


I Didn't Know What Time It Was

by MoreThanSlightly (cadignan)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Fluff, M/M, Masturbation, Oral Sex, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-09
Updated: 2014-06-09
Packaged: 2018-02-04 01:36:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 19,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1761979
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cadignan/pseuds/MoreThanSlightly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s been two days now. He knows it would be logical to get out of the city, but he’s waiting for something. Against everything he knows about hiding, he went to the exhibit on Captain America at the Smithsonian and looked at a photo of a stranger who might have been his twin from seventy years ago. He’s not sure what he wanted. An epiphany of some kind, a feeling of doors opening and light flooding in; whatever it was, it never came.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文 available: [[授權翻譯]不知何時](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2186526) by [CliatDW](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CliatDW/pseuds/CliatDW)



He hesitates in front of the glass case. He’s not accustomed to having a choice, and choosing no longer comes easily to him. He’s also not accustomed to eating for pleasure. If he’s on a mission, he eats only when it serves the purpose of the mission. If he’s not on a mission, all the instances of eating that he can remember involve a kind of beige protein slurry with very little flavor. It is a food for survival, and it bears no resemblance to the array of cakes and tarts in the display case in front of him. He has no memory of ever having eaten anything like them, confections made of flour and butter and eggs, sprinkled with sugar or frosted with something even more decadent.

His memory is a long dark corridor. He walks by room after room after room, but all of the doors are locked. But there are flashes. Faces, voices, and places that he thinks maybe he once knew. Sometimes light slips through the slits under the doors.

The woman behind the counter is not impatient, but she is waiting. He shrugs. It is not as if he knows nothing of the world: he can hack computers and pilot jets and cross borders undetected. He no longer retains the names of his targets, but when necessary he can memorize huge quantities of information. But dessert has no strategic importance. He points at one of the items in the case. It’s a tart of some kind. There’s a crisp lattice of crust overlaying something golden. Baked fruit, probably. He can’t say why he picks it. It doesn’t have colorful frosting or elaborate chocolate decoration. It’s not the biggest or the most expensive, which seem like the most obviously rebellious choices. And he is rebelling; there is no doubt about that. He didn’t kill his target. He didn’t return to his handlers. Instead he pulled his target out of the water and ran.

It’s been two days now. He knows it would be logical to get out of the city, but he’s waiting for something. Against everything he knows about hiding, he went to the exhibit on Captain America at the Smithsonian and looked at a photo of a stranger who might have been his twin from seventy years ago. He’s not sure what he wanted. An epiphany of some kind, a feeling of doors opening and light flooding in; whatever it was, it never came.

He stole a new set of clothes and some cash. He broke into a pharmacy and someone else’s motel room and treated his wounds. The hoodie he stole will have to be good enough to cover up the rest. It’s sweltering in the city, far too hot to be wearing long sleeves and his hood up, but no one will say anything. He has his metal hand shoved into the front pocket of the hoodie. He pushes a crumpled bill across the counter with his free hand.

He needs a moment to plan his next move. This diner is as good as place as any: there’s only one security camera, and he’s facing away from it. There’s the front entrance, and if necessary, he can jump the counter and push his way out through the kitchen, where there’s an exit into an alley. There’s a waitress out there taking a smoke break. She won’t be any trouble. Neither will the girl at the cash register.

The cashier is tiny and blonde. She’s counting his change in her delicate hands. He has a strange urge to smile at her, or maybe wink. He can’t really remember how or why he might do that. It’s more light shining from beneath a door he can’t unlock. Smiling at her won’t help him escape SHIELD or HYDRA or anyone else who might be hunting him. He’s drawing enough attention as it is, bruised and peering out from under his hood.

Besides, he’s already giving in to one frivolous desire. The cashier hands him his change and then slides a paper plate with a slice of tart on it across the counter. “Enjoy your pie,” she says, and he nods and picks up a plastic fork.

 _Pie_. Of course that’s what it’s called. He knows that word. He feels like he’s always known that word. _How could I forget?_ he thinks, but then grimaces. How he forgets isn’t the question. What he needs to know now is how to remember.

Even if he does remember, it’s hard to tell what’s real. His memory’s all disconnected, and he can’t know anything for sure. The diner seems real.

He sits at a tiny corner table with his back to the wall. He surveys the diner, which is populated only by the cashier and an old man drinking coffee at the counter, and then spears a bite of pie on his fork. He makes sure to get both crust and filling, because he wants to do this right.

The crust flakes apart as he bites into it. He tastes sugar and butter and the apple filling slides against his tongue. It’s sweet and warm and crisp like sunshine on the bluest of October days, as satisfying as crunching a dry red leaf against the sidewalk under his shoe. He never told Steve that he sometimes deliberately stepped out of his way if he saw a likely leaf, but once he caught Steve watching him and smiling. Steve was like that. Observant. Everyone else was shuffling through the streets of Brooklyn, just trying to make sure they didn’t run anybody down, but Steve was really looking. Bucky wasn’t as good at observing the world as Steve was, at seeing the right and wrong of things, but he could see Steve, and that was enough.

He drops his fork.

He examines the diner, but neither the cashier nor the old man seems to have picked up on his revelation. He blinks at his pie.

That name again. _Bucky._ That’s what Steve Rogers called him. Is that his name? But he doesn’t have a name. They call him “the asset” or sometimes “soldier.”

The man named Steve in his memory had been small and frail, but he had the same face as the man he dragged out of the river. The man he couldn’t kill. The memory was so clear, but so short, like he’d pushed open a door only to have it slam shut.

Cautiously, he eats another bite. No new memories surface, but the pie is good. Maybe even worth the risk he’s taking by stopping in this diner in the first place. Then again, he doesn’t expect himself to be here, so how could anyone else?

The diner door opens and all he sees is red hair. He jumps up so fast it knocks his table, pie and all, to the floor. He swallows the bite he’s chewing while in mid-air, leaping over the counter and pushing past the cashier into the kitchen and out through the back entrance.

Even as he’s running, he’s not sure he made the right choice. At first he tells himself it’s because a fight with the red-headed agent will attract attention, and if he kills her, her fellow agents will hunt him down. But as he dashes out of the alley and then slows down enough to fit into pedestrian traffic, he realizes that he ran because he doesn’t _want_ to kill her.

Has he ever wanted to kill anyone?

He hunches his shoulders and weaves through the people in front of him. He walks fast, but never breaks into a run. He takes the first set of stairs down that he comes across, and once he’s in the subway station, he goes to the trouble of buying a ticket. Scrupulous rule-following is a useful tactic. Criminals run. Criminals jump over turnstiles. He needs to appear as ordinary and harmless as possible.

He boards the first train. It doesn’t matter where it’s going. He will ride as far as he can, and then he’ll get out and keep running. It would be good to get out of D.C. He could survive in the wilderness. It would be good to get away from all this surveillance equipment, and it might be safer for everyone if he were away from people for awhile.

He keeps his head down and his left hand in his pocket, but he wraps his right hand around a pole as the train departs. It’s the middle of the day and the car is largely empty, which is good. There are two teenagers entangled with each other at the far end of the car, a half-asleep elderly woman with a rolling cart full of groceries, and a man staring intently at his phone. No one is looking at him.

The train screeches and groans into the next station. Four more people board the car, and he assesses their potential danger accordingly. A mother pushing an empty stroller and holding her toddler’s hand: harmless. A tattooed twentysomething with headphones blasting tinny music: harmless.

A red-headed woman.

She wraps her hand around the same pole he’s holding. The movement appears casual, but she positions herself so that she knows he can see her smile. It’s not a happy smile. It’s satisfied, but grim.

“You really want to do this here,” she says, pitching her voice so that only he can hear. “A subway car full of innocents.”

It takes him a moment to think of a response, and it’s one moment too long. She attacks, driving her fist into his stomach and up toward his ribcage. He fights back automatically, shoving her back into the center of the car. The moving train shifts beneath them as he advances on her. He stops. Something about that movement, about a train—but whatever memory it was, it’s gone now. She drives a roundhouse kick toward his side and he dodges. Everyone in the car is watching them now. They’re all clustered at one end with their eyes wide. He thinks one of them—the twentysomething—has a phone out. He can’t pay attention to that now. The redhead has jumped onto him and wrapped her legs around his torso and her hands around his neck. She leans into him with all of her weight just as the train goes around a curve. He loses his balance. Either he can hurl her off and let her slam into the wall of the train car, potentially killing her, or he can go down. He chooses to fall.

She doesn’t remove her hands from his neck. She stares down into his eyes. _She knows_ , he thinks, _she knows I could have killed her and I didn’t_.

“I don’t,” he says, and his voice is scratchy from disuse, “want any of this.”

It’s only an instant, but he can tell there’s a surprised pause. “Is that you surrendering?”

“To SHIELD?”

“To me.”

“You know him,” he says. “The blond man.” He’s afraid to say _Steve_. What if he’s wrong about everything? He’s a man with no memory. It’s hard to know anything for sure.

She narrows her eyes and says nothing. She is protecting the blond man. Perhaps they are romantically involved. He has no notion of how to determine that, but it’s irrelevant. She will say nothing until he does.

“I want,” he says, and it’s a new feeling, to want something and to say it out loud, “I want to talk to him.”

* * *

 

She takes him to a safe house out in the country. She cuffs him, blindfolds him, and drives in circles before they arrive, but he estimates that it takes two hours of driving to get there. The safe house might once have been a hunting cabin, judging from the musty remnants of its decor, but the room that Agent Romanoff locks him in has been stripped bare of anything as useful as a weapon and fitted with a reinforced door and a barred window. There’s a full-size mattress shoved into a corner, but there’s no bed frame or sheets in sight.

She took all his weapons and left his wrists bound, but the cuffs are nothing special. He presses an ear to the wall and hears fragments of her phone call as she stands outside the room. None of it means anything to him, but he’s sure she says “Steve.”

Wherever Steve is when he receives the call, it takes him hours to arrive at the safe house. From the sound of boots on the wood floor, he comes with someone else. There’s a muffled conversation in the other room, one that sounds more like male voices than female voices, and then the bedroom door opens.

Steve lets the door close, but leaves it unlatched. Reading his facial expression is difficult, but based on the tightness of his mouth, he seems to feel a sequence of emotions: relief, happiness, worry, sadness, and then he plasters on a deliberately neutral and stoic expression. “Bucky,” he says, and his tone of voice conveys an even more complex mixture of emotions.

“I don’t know that name.” The room seems too small for both of them to be standing like this, halfway prepared to fight, but he’s too restless and agitated to sit. Steve looks like he might take a step forward, but something sad crosses his face, and he hangs back.

“But you wanted to talk to me.”

He thinks about telling the truth: _I stopped for pie while I was on the run for my life and it made me remember you, so I let your friend capture me because for some reason I need to see you_. No. It’s absurd. It makes him feel vulnerable. It’s better not to reveal anything. He came here to gather information. “Tell me who ‘Bucky’ is.”

Steve doesn’t quite smile. “That’ll take awhile. You want to sit down?”

He narrows his eyes. Steve is wearing jeans and a t-shirt, unarmed except for his strength. His feet are bare. It’s funny to see him like this, since there was a time when Steve ran cold and would have been bundled up no matter the season or—he blinks. More light through the cracks, and Steve has barely said anything.

Cautiously, he lowers himself until he’s sitting on the edge of the mattress. He stiffens when Steve sits down next to him, far too close for comfort.

“I don’t know how much you know about me,” Steve says. He’s careful about where he looks. They face forward into the bedroom, as if the empty wall really bears examining. “You do any background research on your targets, or—?”

He shakes his head. Not this time. They never told him more than they had to, and they didn’t have to tell him much.

“I grew up in Brooklyn in the ‘30s,” Steve says. “James Buchanan Barnes—Bucky—was a dumb jerk who was always sticking his nose where it didn’t belong, joining in fights that _I_ already had under control.”

“Sure,” he says, and it comes out sarcastically, so naturally that he startles himself. He resists the urge to touch his mouth in wonder. Where had that come from?

He startles Steve, too, but Steve looks away quickly and keeps talking. “He was also my best friend.”

The story continues, and none of it is familiar. Steve talks about his mother’s death and his own health problems, all the times he nearly died of pneumonia or his own stupid sense of right and wrong, and how Bucky was always there. Then there’s the war, and the Howling Commandos, and a fall from a train. And a long silence.

The words themselves don’t bring back anything. But there’s something—something about the way Steve talks, his voice, maybe, or maybe just the way he sits there and patiently explains his whole life story to a stranger who recently tried to murder him.

Or maybe not a stranger. Because what else explains this? He has to be Bucky. But he can’t remember enough to be sure. It’s hard to tell what’s real on the best of days. His memory isn’t a reliable source.

But Steve… Steve seems like the definition of reliable.

Steve is looking at him, and it’s hard to be looked at like that, with so much concern. He doesn’t know what to say. In a way, everything is worse if he _is_ Bucky. He’s killed… he doesn’t know how many people. Too many. He tried to kill Steve. He swallows. Is there any worse betrayal than that?

“I don’t,” he starts.

“Remember,” Steve finishes. “Yeah, I got that. From the beating.”

It’s a joke, he thinks, but he cringes. “I’m sorry,” he says. It’s inadequate, but he does mean it.

“Well,” Steve says, full of mock surprise. “A sincere apology. You must not be Bucky after all.”

He shakes his head. It’s too delicate, his sense of self. He doesn’t want to joke. He looks at Steve, and Steve’s expression crumbles. “Hey,” Steve says, and reaches out to put a hand on his shoulder. “I didn’t mean—,”

Grabbing Steve’s wrist in his right hand and wrenching it away is an automatic reaction. Before he knows it, he’s standing, and then they’re both standing, because he’s still got Steve’s wrist in a death grip. Steve makes eye contact as if he’s looking a wild animal in the eyes. “Buck,” he says. He sounds so steady. “Let go.” Steve says it again, and somehow the words filter through the sound of his heart pounding. “It’s me. It’s Steve. Let go.”

 _Shit_ , what is he doing? He takes a shaky breath and releases his grip. “Sorry, I—,”

“No touching,” Steve says. “Got it.”

Steve hadn’t intended to hurt him. But no one has touched him in tenderness since he can remember. He wonders what it would feel like and bitterly wishes he could take back the last two minutes. _Let’s try again_ , he wants to say. _I won’t try to kill you this time_. But he doesn’t. He’s a long way from that and they both know it.

“I don’t know what to do,” he admits.

“Me either, Buck,” Steve says, and he sounds sad. “Don’t look so surprised. There’s no manual for your dead best friend suddenly re-entering your life as the world’s deadliest assassin who has no memory of your shared past.”

“Long title,” he observes, and Steve smiles.

“You want some coffee?”

He doesn’t remember coffee, but he nods. Steve moves toward the door and he hesitates. There are other people in the cabin. People he recently tried to kill. People who might want to kill him. His chest tightens with anxiety. When Steve glances back, he shakes his head minutely.

“I’ll bring it in here.”

Steve is so good, and so quick to understand. It makes his chest tighten in a different way. He wants to be Bucky, just to be Steve’s friend. He doesn’t remember much about friendship, but it seems… good. Warm. Comforting.

All things he doesn’t deserve. He can’t even be sure that he won’t snap and murder Steve five minutes from now.

Steve left the door to the room unlatched as a gesture of trust. It’s easy to slip out into the hallway and out the back door before anyone notices.

* * *

 

It doesn’t say “James Buchanan Barnes” on his forged ID, but he starts to think of himself that way. He’s still not sure it’s true, but he’s tired of being a thing without a name. No other name feels right. So six months later, when he’s standing in front of a brick building in Brooklyn, and someone says “Next block over, Bucky,” he looks up.

Steve is wearing glasses with thick black plastic frames and a cap. It’s a terrible disguise.

Bucky is wearing the same hoodie and jeans he stole six months ago, along with an accumulation of dirt. His hair is hanging down around his face like a filthy curtain. His beard is matted with who knows what. It would be an excellent disguise if it were a disguise, but instead it’s just the only pair of clothes he owns. He hasn’t showered since the last time he crashed at a shelter, which was at least a week ago.

“I can see why you thought it was this one, though,” Steve continues. “They tore the original down and replaced it with some fancy high-rise place.”

“I was guessing from old photos,” he says. He doesn’t even mean to say it. It just comes out of him. _You ran_ , he reminds himself. _It was the right choice_. But it doesn’t feel that way. “And Google Maps,” he adds. In the six months since he ran from Steve, he’s had half a dozen tiny fragments of memory come back to him. It’s not enough.

“Google Maps,” Steve says. “You caught up quick.”

It wasn’t so much catching up as using knowledge he’d learned in his former career, but he’s not eager to bring that up. Bucky wonders if Steve is one of those people who gets in earnest, well-meaning arguments on the internet in a misguided attempt to enlighten asshole strangers, and then has to repress a smile. Of course he is.

“You’re smiling,” Steve says. “Does that mean you’ll come home with me?”

“Awfully forward, Rogers,” Bucky says, and marvels at the way these things come easy sometimes. When he’s with Steve.

“You stood me up last time,” Steve says. “I think you owe me another chance.”

Steve is the first person who has willingly spoken to him in days. People clear the sidewalk and refuse to make eye contact with him, even in this city. It’s not the arm, which he always covers. It might be the filth. It might be his expression. Whatever it is that makes people hate or fear him, being spoken to like a human being makes something inside him ache. He wants to stop moving from place to place and living like a hunted animal. He wants to go with Steve.

Steve’s one to talk about fancy high-rises, since he lives in the fanciest of high-rises right in Manhattan. His apartment is spacious, its emptiness accentuated by the strict neatness of all Steve’s possessions. Only one thing is out of place: there’s a sketchbook lying open on the kitchen table. Steve flips it shut a little too quickly to be casual. “Coffee?”

Bucky feels ill at ease, standing in the entryway of Steve’s apartment with his left hand shoved into his pocket. He doesn’t belong here, in Steve’s nice apartment and nice new life. He belongs where he was, staying in the woods or on the street, away from anyone he might hurt. But where he should be and where he wants to be don’t quite match up, so he says “Yeah,” and keeps standing there.

Steve pushes out one of the kitchen chairs with his foot. “Sit,” he says. Bucky does. “But don’t get used to it. I’m not going to wait on you hand and foot. You get this one cup of coffee, and then you’re doing your own damn dishes.”

Bucky blinks. Steve said _come home_. This isn’t an invitation for coffee. Steve intends for him to stay. He pushes his chair back from the table and stands up. “Steve, I can’t—,”

“You can,” Steve says.

“I can’t be trusted,” Bucky says. “You can’t just let me live here.”

Steve furrows his brow in mock confusion. “I can’t? Last I checked, my name was on the lease.”

“I’m not staying.”

“I can’t make you,” Steve allows. “But I wish you would.”

Bucky regards him with a mixture of desperation and skepticism. God only knows what secret protocols decades of conditioning have carved into his psyche. He could sleepwalk into Steve’s room and murder him. Not to mention that Bucky is a wanted fugitive. Steve isn’t safe if he’s here, and neither is anyone else in the building. Bucky can’t be trusted, and he wishes Steve wouldn’t look at him like he could.

“Where will you go, if not here?” Steve says. “Under a bridge somewhere? Somebody’s barn? Whoever or whatever it is that you’re running from, I can handle it. We can handle it. And I think you know that.” 

Steve is staring him down, not fiercely, but resolutely, with the confidence of someone who knows he’s right. And something about this is so familiar—not these exact circumstances, but the feeling of arguing with Steve—that Bucky almost agrees. But one little wisp of memory’s not enough. He’s got a point to make. He has to put up more of a fight.

“It’s a bad idea,” he says. He opens his mouth to say all his reasons, because it _is_ a bad idea, in fact it’s a goddamn terrible idea, and they’re both going to regret it, but nothing comes out.

“Please,” Steve says.

Bucky closes his eyes and caves with a sigh. “Fine.” When he opens his eyes again, Steve is clearly trying not to smile. Yeah, that feels familiar. Not so much the feeling of having an argument with Steve, but the feeling of _losing_ an argument with Steve. “Did I ever win an argument with you?”

“Now that you mention it,” Steve says, “I can’t recall that ever happening, no.”

* * *

 

Steve offers him a towel and a set of clothes. It’s a very gentle way of being told that he reeks and needs to wash. Going into the bathroom sets his heart racing. He’d showered a few times at shelters over the last few months, but the showers were always communal and while nothing happened to him in one, he never felt safe. He’s spent so much of his life—the parts of it he can remember, anyway—wearing armor and multiple weapons strapped to his body. The rest of his memories are of being manhandled into a chair and brainwashed into submission. Stripping down doesn’t come easily.

But he locks the door and the window and takes a deep breath. It takes him an age to get his clothes off because he has to keep forcing himself to breathe. _No one is here_ , he reminds himself. He can do this. It’s just a shower.

He never truly feels calm, but he manages to soap up and rinse off regardless. His hair is a nightmare of dirty tangles and shaving off his beard dulls the disposable razor Steve gave him. He almost recognizes the person in the mirror when he finishes.

The clothes Steve gave him smell like laundry detergent. Bucky wonders how long he can borrow them. He’ll be glad to get rid of the dirty, ill-fitting ones he stole six months ago. These new clothes might be too big for him but at least they’ll be clean.

He pulls the t-shirt over his head and is surprised to discover that it fits.

* * *

 

He wakes up with his left hand wrapped around someone’s throat. Someone is rasping, “Bucky. Bucky, it’s me.”

 _Steve_. He lets go so fast that anyone else would have stumbled or fallen to the floor. Steve just stands there, looking concerned. Bucky doesn’t know where they are until a few careful glances reveal that they’re in the bedroom Steve had shown him only a few hours ago. The neatly made bed is in total disarray, blankets on the floor and sheets twisted around his ankles. Steve is standing at the edge of his bed.

“My fault,” Steve says sheepishly. “You were screaming, so I—,” he gestures vaguely at the door and at his current position, “and then you,” another gesture, one that Bucky assumes means _tried to sleep-murder me_.

“Sorry,” he mutters. It’s difficult to breathe. His t-shirt sticks to him with cold sweat, but he feels a hot flush of shame creeping under his skin. The whole effect is dizzying. How are you supposed to feel, exactly, after you accidentally try to strangle the only person in the world that you even halfway remember, let alone like?

“Do you, um, need—anything—uh, I could…”

“Coffee,” Bucky says, because it will make Steve go away for a few minutes, and Steve seems to need a task to complete. “M’gonna shower.”

He takes a short, hot shower and tries not to think about anything. Not the muzzle they made him wear, or the chair they strapped him into, and definitely not how close he came to killing Steve. Steve doesn’t even seem angry. Of course he doesn’t.

While he towels off his hair, there’s a quiet knock on the bathroom door. He freezes. In a single, rushed breath, Steve says, “I thought you might want another set of clothes. I’ll leave them outside.” Then it’s quiet for a moment. Bucky opens the door an inch, sees a new t-shirt and a pair of sweatpants neatly folded and stacked on the ground, and grabs them. In contrast to the other set of clothes, these are slightly too big, but he’s so relieved that he doesn’t have to put his damp t-shirt back on that he hardly notices.

He walks into the warm glow of the kitchen. Steve is sitting at the table with two mugs of coffee. Bucky wonders if he turned on all the lights on purpose, the way you might if your four-year-old was afraid of a monster in their closet. He sits down as lightly as possible and hunches over the table, like reducing the amount of space he takes up will help somehow. He wraps his hands around the mug. The problem is that the monster’s not in his closet. The monster’s in him.

The mug radiates heat against his hands. He can even feel it in the left one. He doesn’t feel much with that one, nothing beyond what might be useful to a killing machine: hot, cold, and the weight of heavy things. Sometimes he wishes that’s all he could feel with the rest of his body.

“You gonna drink that coffee or just stare at it?”

It’s the feeling of having his hands wrapped around the mug, the heat of it, that calls something to the surface. “We used to drink this a lot,” Bucky says, as slowly as it comes to him. “In the winter.”

Steve nods, too cautious to interrupt with words.

“You were sick all the time,” Bucky says. They could never afford good enough coats or enough heat for their apartment. Steve used to shiver so much when they were walking around the city that Bucky would drag him into diners and buy them both black coffee, because it was hot and it was the only thing he could afford. He always claimed it was on account of his coffee addiction. It started out as a line he’d use to make sure Steve couldn’t say no, because Steve always refused if he thought you were taking pity on him. Then it turned into a real caffeine dependence, which was a headache when money got tight or when coffee got rationed.

“Not all the time,” Steve protests.

Bucky shoots Steve a look for that. It’s funny that even with the health and the proportions of a Greek god, Steve still feels the same way. Everybody else was always making a big fuss over him for no reason, because he’d been just fine the whole time. In a way, Steve eventually won that argument, too.

“I was addicted to this stuff,” Bucky says.

“I know,” Steve says. “I had to listen to you whine about it all the time.”

“Not all the time.”

Steve smiles over the lip of his mug before he takes a sip. It feels like light spilling in, like an old memory and maybe a new one too.

“I remembered pie,” he offers, which sounds utterly stupid once it’s out of his mouth, but Steve has the grace not to say so.

“What kind?”

“Apple,” he says. “I don’t even know why I bought it, but—why are you looking at me like that?”

“Nothing.” Steve is smiling. “You stole a slice of pie from our neighborhood diner when we were kids. Would’ve gotten away with it, too, but you shared it with me.”

“Was it apple?”

“No, I think it was some kind of custard. I remember because it splattered all over the ground when I stood up after you told me you stole it.”

“And you reported my crime to someone?” It’s strange to be told a story about his past and have no memory of it, but he supposes it’s about to become a commonplace occurrence.

“I dragged you back to the diner and made you apologize. Then we pooled our change together until we had enough to pay for the piece you stole.”

“Oh.” This is what other people’s lives consist of, he thinks. Funny anecdotes and moments they shared with someone else, stories about childhood misdemeanors that make them laugh or sigh with nostalgia. It makes him ache with emptiness, like somebody scooped out his whole self and scraped his insides clean.

“Miss Roberta gave us a free slice for being so honest,” Steve says, clearly relishing the end of the story. “As I recall, that one was apple.”

“Oh,” he says, in a different tone. Maybe he’s not so hollow after all. “I don’t remember that,” he says. “But the taste of the pie brought back—something. You and me, walking around Brooklyn.”

“Like Proust and the madeleine, but an American version,” Steve says, and Bucky blinks. “You know, Marcel Proust, _In Search of Lost Time_ , he eats a madeleine and remembers his childhood for three thousand pages?”

“It wasn’t that dramatic,” Bucky says, although it would nice if it were that easy. Or maybe it’s better that he can’t remember everything. “I don’t even know that a description of my entire life would last three thousand pages, and I’m technically in my nineties.”

“You should see your file—,” Steve says, and then he snaps his mouth shut. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have.”

“Not talking about it doesn’t make it go away,” Bucky says. But it is about the closest he can get to making it go away, so he’s just fine not talking about it, thanks very much.

“Do you want to—,” Steve starts, and the rest of the sentence is so obviously _talk about it_ that Bucky just glares at him, eyes half-lidded like he can’t even be bothered to be fully awake for this bullshit. “I’ll take that as a no,” Steve says, so unnecessarily that it surprises a smile out of him.

In a way, it would be easier if Steve were mad at him. If he could hate himself all the time, enough to go numb, life would be simpler. “It’s three in the morning,” he tells Steve. “You should go to bed.”

“You too,” Steve says.

Bucky’s gaze slides toward the coffee pot on the counter. “Yeah,” he says.

Steve stands up, puts his mug in the sink, and walks over to where Bucky is still seated. Steve hesitates, then lays a hand on his shoulder. Bucky flinches, but forces himself not to move any more than that. They stay still like that for a moment. No one has touched him like this in years. Bucky lets himself relax into for a moment. Steve’s hand is warm. “You have to sleep sometime,” Steve says, with such gentleness that it’s almost painful.

Bucky shakes his head. He’d been getting by on three or four hours a night on his own.

Steve nods in resignation and then leaves him alone in the kitchen. The air is cool where Steve’s hand used to be.

Three or four hours worth of nightmares is all the nightmares Bucky cares to have, not that he could sleep more if he wanted to. Whatever they did to him, or maybe he’d done it to himself somehow, there was a part of him that was always awake. Not awake as in alert, but awake as in afraid. Hunted and ready to attack. Rest—real, deep sleep—was a luxury he couldn’t afford. Peace was a distant memory, a land from which he’d been exiled long ago. You can’t go home again.

* * *

 

For the next few days, Bucky pretends to go to sleep so that Steve won’t nag him about it, and once he’s sure that Steve’s in bed in the other room, he gets up and stays awake all night. He starts working his way through all the books in Steve’s apartment, but then switches to surreptitiously borrowing Steve’s laptop because the glow helps him stay awake.

When Steve gets up at 6AM, Bucky exits his bedroom with a show of stretching and rubbing his eyes. Any books that he touched and the laptop have all been replaced exactly where they were the previous night. They go jogging together, initially because Steve had already bought running shoes and exercise clothes in Bucky’s size and it felt ungrateful to refuse, and after awhile, because jogging with Steve makes the inside of his head a little calmer.

They do other things that normal people do, too. They go to the grocery and cook and clean. Both of them are mediocre cooks at best, and the taste of oversalted soup and burned potatoes brings back as many memories as coffee or pie. After a couple of days, Steve introduces him to Chinese and Indian takeout, and then talks excitedly about how the the abolition of immigration quotas is one of the best things ever to happen to America in general and American food in particular. Bucky is inclined to agree.

Steve also introduces him to Sam Wilson, and Sam is alarmingly nice, given that all their previous encounters involved potentially fatal violence. It’s easy to see how Sam and Steve became friends. Sam also turns out to be a good cook, which is definitely a point in his favor.

Steve does not introduce him to any of the other residents of the tower, but Agent Romanoff comes by one afternoon when Steve is out at some kind of meeting. She doesn’t knock.

“Did Steve give you a key?” He stands in the entryway, blocking her from moving further into the apartment. Rationally, he knows that she is Steve’s friend and she probably didn’t come here to fight, but that doesn’t slow down the rapid beat of his heart. He’s not good with surprises. Or any kind of human interaction, really.

“Define ‘give’,” she says, and maybe he’s imagining it, but she looks pleased with herself. She leans back against the door, looking relaxed. She’s wearing a striped blue hoodie and jeans. She looks different out of her uniform, but he knows better than to underestimate her. “Tell me what’s going on with you two. Is Steve okay? Are you okay?”

“Define ‘okay’,” he says, and she rolls her eyes.

“Fine,” she says. “I don’t need you to tell me, anyway.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be attending whatever meeting Steve is attending? With Stark and the others?”

“Don’t think you can get something for nothing, Barnes,” she says. A moment later, she relents: “The truth is I hate meetings.”

“I don’t like groups of people much myself,” he offers, and she nods.

“I think we have a few things in common,” she says, and the sentence passes between them like the tip of an iceberg. He’s afraid to know how deep it goes. Then in a different tone, she says, “Hey, if we’re not going to talk about anything important, can I give you a haircut? Don’t get me wrong, the regular washing is a huge improvement, but still. It seems like you might prefer it shorter.”

He touches his hair self-consciously where it hangs down in front of his face. He does want it shorter. But he thinks about sitting down in front of Agent Romanoff and letting her stand behind him with a pair of scissors, and letting her touch him, and shakes his head mutely. He can’t do that yet. He can barely even control his breathing when Steve touches his shoulder or brushes past him to get to a cabinet in the kitchen.

He expects her to make a joke or roll her eyes again, but she doesn’t. “Alright,” she says, softly. She pulls a stretchy green band off her wrist and offers it to him, and he stares at it. “Men,” she sighs, and then demonstrates gathering her hair behind her head and pulling it through the loop into a ponytail.

Next time she offers him the band, he takes it and follows her example. It’s a relief to have his hair out of his face, especially without anyone else touching him.

“Aren’t you bored here alone all day?”

He shrugs. In response, she slips by him and goes into the kitchen, where she sits down at the table and pulls out a pack of cards. They play poker for the next hour, using a stack of silverware as chips.

It’s a nice distraction. “Agent Romanoff, are you… babysitting me?”

“My name is Natasha,” she says.

“That’s not an answer, _Natasha_.”

“I don’t babysit.”

He looks at her, unconvinced.

“It’s a reconnaissance mission,” she says. “Find out more about the strange man in Steve’s apartment.”

“And?”

“Well, you’re a terrible poker player, for one,” she says, and lays down her hand, then sweeps a pile of silverware closer to her side of the table. “It’s probably the lack of sleep affecting your cognitive abilities.”

He goes still. “Don’t tell Steve.”

“He’ll figure it out soon enough.” She stands up from the table. “Anyway, I should be going. You ever want to go out in the world with someone who’s not a ninety-five-year-old goody-two-shoes, you come upstairs and find me.” She pauses. “And if you hurt Steve,” she says, and finishes her sentence with a look.

Bucky wishes he could say _I won’t_ and mean it. Instead, he nods.

“Keep the hair tie,” she says, and leaves.

* * *

 

“I like the ponytail,” Steve says as they’re about to go out for their morning jog.

Bucky stops. Something happens inside him that isn’t the adrenaline spike of a fight or the painful airless tightening of an anxiety attack. It’s something new and therefore alarming, and if he’s ever felt this way before, he can’t remember, so he just stares and says nothing.

Steve blushes and looks away. “Let’s go running,” he says, and Bucky remembers how to breathe.

* * *

 

It’s 4AM and Bucky can’t stare at the internet any more, and the words are blurring together in every book he picks up. But he needs to do something to stay awake. He wanders out of his room, padding as silently as he can, thinking maybe he can watch some television with the volume off.

Steve’s sketchbook is lying on the kitchen table.

It’s closed, like it always is ever since the first day when Steve snapped it shut as Bucky walked into the apartment. He shouldn’t open it. Steve has been nothing but good to him. Steve deserves a little privacy. It’s his own damn apartment, after all.

But he can’t stop thinking about it. What could possibly be in there? As far as he can tell, with the exception of the sketchbook, Steve never hides anything. Well, one night when they were watching something that Steve’s friend Tony recommended that had a _lot_ of sex scenes in it, he said “Oh God,” picked up a throw pillow, hid his face in it, and muttered “not funny, Tony,” but that’s different.

 _One page_ , he tells himself. He’ll look at one page and then tomorrow morning he’ll apologize to Steve and Steve will probably tell him it’s no big deal and offer to show him the rest and everything will be fine. Right? Steve didn’t get mad at Bucky for trying to choke him to death, so it’s hard to imagine him getting angry about this.

Bucky knows Steve wanted to be an artist, but he can’t really remember anything about the drawings. He’s not sure what he expects—a landscape or a portrait of a pretty girl. Maybe Natasha, if she would ever agree to that kind of thing.

The first page is a collection of charcoal sketches of male nudes in different poses. It takes a second to register what he’s looking at, since it’s dark in the kitchen and he hasn’t slept in nine days. When the images come together in his mind, his first thought is _wow_. Steve is really good. His second thought is about all those thick thighs and muscular backs on the page in front of him, and he flips the book shut immediately.

Steve drew him once. Or maybe more than once. Not naked—no, they never—he wasn’t naked. It was a portrait. He remembers complaining that Steve was taking too long, and he had to get up a take a leak, and Jesus, could Steve draw any slower? And Steve telling him to quit whining.

It had been a good likeness, a three-quarter view of his face. He had thought he looked handsome, and he’d said so, and Steve had ribbed him about being vain. And then he’d thought more about the way Steve had drawn him gazing off into space with his eyes dreamy, like he was longing for something. And the way Steve had drawn his lips slightly parted—there was something almost indecent about it, even though it was only a picture of his face. _Is that really how Steve sees me?_ he’d thought, and then he’d shut down that line of thinking and forced himself to think about girls for awhile.

Those pictures of naked men in the sketchbook make him wonder about Steve. But Steve loved Peggy. And Bucky has loved all kinds of women, or so he’s been told. And this is a useless thing to think about at 4AM. Bucky slips back into his bedroom and lies down in his untouched bed.

The sound of his own heartbeat keeps him awake.

* * *

 

“You know you don’t have to pretend,” Steve says the next morning. Bucky freezes. “I know you’re not sleeping.”

“Oh,” he says. He pours himself a mug of coffee and sits down at the table. It’s easier to hide the fact that the whole world feels a little unsteady if he’s sitting down. “That.”

“Yeah, that,” Steve says. He’s leaning back against the kitchen counter, both hands resting on the edge. “Some covert operative you are. You ran my laptop battery down every night this week. And for future reference, all that fake stretching and yawning stuff did not fool anyone. You are a _terrible_ actor.”

“I’ve seen those old propaganda reels,” Bucky says, smirking, because he’s spent a lot of time on the internet lately and apparently playing takes-one-to-know-one with Steve is as deep-seated a memory as they come.

Steve blushes. He looks away for a moment, and Bucky studies his profile. Unlike the rest of him, his face didn’t change much after the serum. Steve had always been beautiful.

“Look, we can make it a long time on no sleep, but we can’t make it forever. You need sleep, Buck.”

Bucky drinks his coffee without saying anything. What’s there to say, really? “I can’t fall asleep because I’ll have nightmares”? “I can’t fall asleep because I might hurt someone”? “I can’t fall asleep because I might kill you”? Steve knows all that already.

“Please,” Steve says. And that trick might have worked before, because he always wants to make Steve happy, but it won’t work this time. He can only be the person that he needs to be around Steve if he’s awake. Steve hasn’t got that through his thick skull yet, but he will.

“That an order, Captain?”

“You know it isn’t,” Steve says, unwilling to be baited into a fight. “I just want you to try. I hate standing around and watching you suffer.”

Always so goddamn earnest. “So sedate me.”

Steve’s eyes widen with genuine hurt. Bucky shrugs. It’s not like he hasn’t been forcefully sedated before. Spent most of his life that way, if you think about it.

Bucky expects some kind of _you know I would never do that to you_ and _you’re my friend not my prisoner_ and whatever other painfully noble bullshit Steve can come up with, which he deserves absolutely none of.

Instead, Steve says quietly, “Is it me?”

Bucky’s not sure what to make of that.

“Am I the reason you can’t sleep? Do you feel unsafe around me? I can get you another apartment, I’m sure there’s a vacant space in the tower somewhere, or somewhere farther away if you want, just say the word and I’ll call Tony and—,”

Bucky closes his eyes. No matter how irritable he is, no matter how much he wants to reject all of Steve’s sympathy and concern by being a cranky ungrateful piece of shit, he can’t let Steve think that. Being with Steve is the only time he ever feels halfway human.

But he can’t say that. So he says “It’s not you.”

“Okay,” Steve says, with the air of someone who just relearned how to breathe. “Okay.”

“I don’t want to talk about this any more,” he says. The whole thing feels awful. He can’t stand Steve being nice to him and he can’t stand hurting Steve’s feelings. He wants Steve to leave him alone and he wants Steve to stay with him forever. It makes no sense.

“Let’s talk about something else then,” Steve says, and just like that, they start over. The sun is out, so they leave the apartment and go for a walk in the park. They talk about going to the beach as kids, how the water was always so damn cold and how they always swam anyway. Bucky pretends not to be tired and Steve pretends not to notice. They both pretend that they’re not about to have the same fight again as soon as the sun goes down.

They eat dinner on the couch in front of the TV. Steve wants to watch some long documentary series on public television about jazz. Steve watches a lot of documentaries. He’s always trying to catch up on things he missed and inform himself about current events and various injustices. How he has the energy for all that caring is a mystery that Bucky long ago gave up trying to solve. “We were around for jazz,” Bucky reminds him. “I don’t really remember it, but we were.”

“Not all of it,” Steve says. “Be quiet and watch.”

Some of the music is vaguely familiar. He remembers his feet aching after dancing all night and stale cigarette smoke in all his clothes. There’s some kind of story to the documentary, a narrative about the rise and fall of certain genres and musicians, but it’s hard to pay attention. He sits on the couch next to Steve, not touching but certainly close enough to touch. He wouldn’t let anyone else get so close, but with Steve it’s alright. He’s not even breathing fast. _This must be what it feels like to be a person_ , he thinks, and the sad absurdity of it makes him huff out a laugh.

Steve looks over at him but doesn’t ask what he’s thinking about. He just smiles and then looks back at the screen. Bucky relaxes, laying his head on the back of the couch. He glances at the TV from time to time, but mostly he just looks at Steve. Steve is the best thing ever to happen to him, twice now or maybe three times. That doesn’t make a lot of sense, but he’s sleepy.

 


	2. Chapter 2

Bucky wakes up and bolts upright. Where is he? It’s dark. He’s in a bed. There are sheets twisted around his legs. He forces himself to breathe.  _Steve’s apartment_. He’s in the second bedroom in Steve’s apartment. The last thing he remembers is watching TV on the living room couch. How did he get here? Did Steve carry him?

According to his cell phone screen, it’s 5AM. That means he’s missing… maybe six hours. Did he really sleep for six whole hours? With no nightmares? He must have; he feels brand new. There’s a goddamn miracle for you.

Still, he doesn’t want to risk falling back asleep and having the whole thing go sour. He’ll get up and read until Steve is ready to go running.

Bucky swings his door open as silently as possible and moves into the living room and kitchen area. He stops at the sight of Steve, already sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee. He looks a little ragged. He’s flipping through his sketchbook, but he shuts it when he hears Bucky walk over next to the table.

“Is this some kind of curse where only one of us can be asleep at a time?” Bucky says.

“Let’s hope not,” Steve says fervently.

Bucky pulls a chair out from the table and sits down in it casually, angling himself toward Steve. “Why do you always do that?” he says, tilting his head at the sketchbook. “You hiding dirty pictures in there, Rogers?” It must be his miraculous good mood; Bucky hasn’t thought about dirty pictures in ages. It occurs to him that he hasn’t felt much desire to think about that kind of stuff. He can’t remember if he’s ever felt any desire, and that scares him.

But even in the dim light from the single bulb above the stove, he can see Steve’s cheeks redden. “Nah,” Steve says. “Just embarrassed.”

“Got no reason to be,” Bucky says. “As I recall, you were good.”

“You recall that, huh?”

“Well, I might’ve… peeked,” he admits. “Sorry. I meant to tell you.”

Steve goes even redder. He grimaces. “You looked?”

“I didn’t expect you to be so upset about it,” Bucky says. “It was only the first page, I swear.”

“Oh,” Steve says. “Only the first page. That’s okay, I guess.”

“Page two must really be something else.”

“It’s, um,” Steve pauses. “Well.” He flips to the second page and shoves the sketch book across the table toward Bucky. It’s a full-page charcoal head study of a woman.

“Peggy.” It must have been done from memory, because she’s young in the portrait. And she’s as beautiful as she always was. Steve knew how to pick ‘em. “What happened to her? Did you two ever… ?”

Steve shakes his head. “It’s a sad story,” he says. “I visit her sometimes. She doesn’t really know who I am.”

“Guess that happens to you a lot.”

Some joke. Steve sighs, closes his eyes, smiles, and blinks like someone trying not to break down in tears.

Until that moment, Bucky hadn’t thought about it. He’d had too many other burdens to carry. But it must have been unbearably lonely, crashing into the ice as a young man and waking up in an unknown future, with everyone you’d ever loved dead, gone, or almost. Steve is bearing it all with grace. And to see someone from your past, someone you missed deeply, only to discover they’ve forgotten you—

Bucky reaches across the table and lays his hand over Steve’s. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I know you loved her.”

It’s funny. That’s the only thing he really remembers about Peggy. She was stunning and Steve loved her. He’s sure he must have known more about her, about her character and her job and the way she dressed and whether she liked dancing, but he can’t remember a thing.  _Steve loves Peggy_ , though, that thought might as well have been carved into his brain. It’s that clear and that painful.

“Yeah,” Steve says, distracted. He’s staring at their hands and holding very still. “You came back to me, at least.”

Is he making Steve uncomfortable with his touch? Bucky draws his hand away. “I don’t know about that,” he says. It takes him a long time to formulate the next part. “Sometimes I wish I remembered everything, so that I could just be him. Sometimes I wish I didn’t remember anything. Maybe it would be easier if… if I knew I was rotten all the way through.”

“You’re not.”

He laughs, and it comes out raspy and mean. “That’s not how it feels, most of the time.”

“I know you,” Steve says. He looks like he means it, like he believes it with all of his pure, righteous heart. Bucky wants to be the person that Steve thinks he is. But his splintered memory pieces together a different picture.

“I might not ever remember all of it,” he tells Steve. “I might not ever get any better.” He still can’t figure out why Steve is okay with him laying around the house. Even if he weren’t an infamous HYDRA assassin and a wanted fugitive, who wants a useless do-nothing roommate taking up space in their apartment? Who wants to live with somebody so broken that they can’t be around other people or sleep without waking up screaming and violent? Steve is patient, but even he has to have limits. “I might be fucked up forever,” he says, because it’s better that they talk about this now.

“You think there’s some kind of test you have to pass to be my friend?” Steve says. “How come you don’t think you’re enough, just the way you are?”

Bucky doesn’t bother to answer that.

Steve shuts the sketchbook and draws it toward him. He looks down at it and fiddles with the edges a little, then laughs to himself. “It’s funny. Here I am, afraid that I’m selfish for keeping you cooped up here just because I want you around, and there you are, afraid that I’m gonna kick you out the first chance I get. That’s funny, right?”

“Not really.”

“Yeah,” Steve says. “Guess not.”

Silence fogs up the air between them. Steve fiddles with the sketchbook again. Steve showed him the second page and nothing else, then quickly closed it and pulled it away. He was awfully careful about it, but now doesn’t seem like the right moment to ask.

“It’s not even funny in an O. Henry short-story twist kind of way?” Steve asks after a minute.

The combination of the long pause, the awkward timing, and the absolute refusal to let go of the subject makes Bucky want to smile for some reason. It doesn’t dredge up any particular memories, but there’s a familiarity to it. It’s like finding a coat in the back of a closet that still fits. “You read too much,” Bucky tells him.

“It’s a little funny.”

Bucky presses his lips together shakes his head.

“It is, though.”

“Now you’re just being stubborn about it,” Bucky says. “Are you getting fussy because it’s almost time for your morning jog?”

“Be quiet. You know I’m right.”

“I think you telling me to be quiet means you forfeit the argument.”

“That puts us at a lifetime total of me, 5000; you, 1,” Steve says. He stands up from the table. “Are you coming with me or not?”

“I don’t know,” Bucky says, and for an instant, Steve looks a little sad. “I have a lot of important meetings to attend. Places to be, people to talk to. My schedule’s packed.” He smirks. Steve tilts his head, exasperated. “Don’t ask dumb questions.”

Bucky walks back into the bedroom and changes his clothes. He’s lacing up his shoes before he realizes that they came close to talking about something real and painful, and then they distracted themselves with a pointless argument. Steve claims to want him around, but Steve wants World-War-II-era James Buchanan Barnes and instead he got stuck with the malfunctioning knockoff. What happens when Steve realizes that he’ll never be as good as the original? The question weighs on him as he joins Steve by the front door.

Steve is supporting himself with one hand against the wall, stretching his calves. Bucky’s gaze follows the curve of his calf to the well-defined muscles of his thigh, remembers the sketchbook, and then his brain shuts down. He stares at the floor for a minute.

Steve finishes stretching and then turns around. “Look,” Steve says. “I, um—it hasn’t been easy, here, since I… woke up. It’s,” Steve stops and glances away, “well, ‘lonely’ I guess is the word. And I know it’s nothing like what you went through and I don’t mean to complain. I just… thought I’d tell you. Things are a little easier when you’re around. And I guess I haven’t said that yet, and I know you don’t want me to get sappy, but,” Steve stops again. He’s not holding himself like broad-shouldered icon of manliness. He’s looking at the floor and the walls a lot. At first Bucky is wary, because he can’t really remember any conversations as raw and honest as this and there’s no chance he’ll respond correctly or adequately. But it’s Steve, who will leap over a burning pit without thinking about it twice, and somehow he’s still a little shy. It’s sweet.

 “I like all the other people in this tower just fine. But to them I’m… like a cartoon character or something. Sometimes they look at me and see a trading card. They can’t help it. That’s the world they grew up in. But you… you look at me and you see something else. That’s important to me. You’re important to me. The friend I had back in Brooklyn  _and_  the person you are now. I don’t know how else to say that, but I want you to know.”

Bucky blinks, and wonders if his throat closing up like this might kill him, and then Steve opens the door and jogs into the hallway and down the stairs.

* * *

 

Bucky needs to say something to Steve, something like  _thank you_  or  _you’re important to me too_ , but every time he tries, he ends up changing the subject like a damn coward. So far he’s finished sentences starting with “Steve, I…” in the following ways: …read an interesting article in the  _Times_  this morning, …heard it’s going to rain today, …’m kinda hungry. It’s like some kind of condition. It’s awful.

“Have you been sleeping okay?” Steve says, narrowing his eyes.

“Uh,” Bucky says. It’s been weeks since he’s gotten six full hours, but he’s been trying. He hasn’t attacked Steve again, but there’s no other progress to speak of. He still wakes up sweaty and shaking five or six times a week, but Steve doesn’t need to know that. Bucky can get by on a few hours a night. “Yeah,” he finishes.

He thinks he’s gotten away with it, but then the next day Sam “drops by” and asks if Bucky feels up to going with him to some kind of support group for veterans.

“I don’t belong there. I’m not—I’ve done—,”

“Seems to me like you do,” Sam says. “You’re a veteran.” He shrugs. “I won’t make you go if you don’t want to, but it can be really good.”

“Steve put you up to this,” Bucky says.

“Actually it was my idea,” Sam says. “But he might have mentioned he was worried about you. Once or twice or four hundred thousand times. But hey, who’s counting? That man loves you. And you know, not to get too touchy-feely about it, but a friend of his is a friend of mine. And I’ve been going to this group a lot since I came up to New York and they’re good people. We help each other. Might help you, too.”

Bucky is so distracted by the phrase “that man loves you” that he agrees to go. He spends the whole train ride over, and all of the time before the meeting starts, thinking  _like a friend_. Loves you like a friend. He definitely meant like a friend. Steve doesn’t love him. That doesn’t make any sense. Bucky is a possibly irreparably fucked-up former killing machine who can barely speak to strangers on good days. Steve is a hero. Steve is smart and sweet and gloriously beautiful and one of the most genuinely good people on the face of the earth. The whole idea is nonsense. It hardly even makes sense for them to be friends, but that’s Steve for you. Bucky almost says to Sam “you meant like a friend, right?” but he’s not ready to reveal just how pathetic he is.

Sam is right about the meeting, though. It’s good. It’s good to hear other soldiers talk about the difficulties of coming home, their alienation and trouble sleeping and anger issues and panic attacks and everything they lost in war. They talk about coping, too, about how the meetings have helped them and all the strategies they’ve learned to deal with the world. It helps to know that other people feel those things and learn to live with them. It’s not the same for him, of course, because they’re all fundamentally good people who had terrible things happen to them, and he’s a lot more of a terrible thing than a good person. But he’s trying to be someone else now, and that’s got to be worth something.

Sam looks at him funny when he says that after the meeting. They stayed after everyone else, sitting in the last two folding chairs in the empty community center room.

“You know it wasn’t you, right?” Sam says.

Bucky shrugs. “It was my finger on the trigger.”

Sam shakes his head. “That’s not how I see it,” he says.

“Either way, they’re my nightmares.”

“You ever thought about talking to someone?” Sam is cautious about saying this. Bucky wonders if it’s because he’s worried about generational differences. The internet has taught him that it is now more common for people to seek therapy. Sam makes a gesture with his palms open, an I-mean-no-harm kind of gesture. “Just a thought. It helped me. And, you know, if you ever want to come back here with me, you can.”

“I’ll think about it,” Bucky says, and is surprised to find himself telling the truth.

* * *

 

A few nights later, after a particularly blood-soaked nightmare, he can’t get back to sleep. It’s cool but not freezing out, so he decides to get some air. There’s supposedly a rooftop garden on the sixteenth floor, but he’s never been. He dresses, grabs his key, and slips out.

There’s someone on the roof in the dead of night. He flattens himself along a wall until a break in the clouds and a shaft of moonlight reveal red hair.

“Natasha,” he says. He walks up behind her with caution, not wanting to startle her. It’s probably difficult to startle her, but he doesn’t intend to test that theory. She’s standing at the edge of the garden, resting her hands on the wall and looking out into the city. “It’s four in the morning.”

“So? You’re out here.” It sounds defensive and accusatory at the same time. It’s a lot of attitude in very few words.

“I couldn’t sleep,” he explains.

“You’re not the only one with nightmares, Barnes,” she says. She doesn’t look at him.

He blinks. It’s not exactly an invitation to further conversation.

“In Sam’s meeting they talked a lot about breathing exercises and focusing on other things,” he says. He’s tried a few of the things they mentioned. They help, sometimes.

“So help me focus on other things,” she says. “Distract me.”

“I’m not sure what excitement you think I have in my life of sitting around Steve’s apartment, working up the nerve to go to the grocery,” he says.

“You’ve lived there for weeks. You have a key in your pocket. It’s not just Steve’s apartment.”

He’s not sure what to say. According to Steve, he used to talk to women all the time. But these days, what with  _women_  being part of the larger category of  _people_ , he has a little trouble. She has a point, but he’s not ready to think of it as their apartment or his apartment. It’s Steve’s apartment. He’s Steve’s… roommate. Problem. Burden. Something like that. He wishes he could think of it as  _our_  apartment.

“Maybe some day,” he mutters.

“You like him,” she says after a moment. It comes out of nowhere. She says it like she’s just worked out the answer to a puzzle.

“Of course I like him, we’re frien…,” he says, trailing off as she smiles wider than he’s ever seen her smile. He grimaces. “Is it that obvious?”

“I’m good,” she says. “But also… yeah, probably.”

“Do you think he knows?”

She shrugs. “Why don’t you ask him?” Then she turns. “You’re a good distraction,” she says, like she hasn’t just flipped his tiny little semblance of a life over, and walks away.

At least the next few hours are spent lying in bed awake for a slightly less gut-wrenching reason than usual.

He wants to thank Steve. He wants to tell Steve he’s important. He feels awful that he hasn’t yet. But he can’t because he’s afraid that the words that come out won’t be  _you’re my best friend_  but  _I’m in love with you and I think I always have been_. He can’t lay that on Steve. Steve’s so goddamn upstanding he’ll probably feel obligated to try it out anyway, and that won’t be good for either of them.

Bucky’s not even sure he could have sex, anyway. Not that he doesn’t understand the general idea—he’s pretty sure he’s done it before, based on some comments Steve has made, but he can’t actually remember—but that he just hasn’t felt anything move down there in ages. Even if Steve were interested—in men in general, and in him in specific—Bucky couldn’t ask him to tie himself to someone who might never be able to reciprocate those kinds of feelings.

He can’t tell Steve. He should just be grateful for what they have.

* * *

 

A few days later, on a rare solo venture out into the world to pick up toilet paper and milk, he crosses paths with Natasha in the stairwell. It’s hard to meet her eyes. He can only think the sentence  _please don’t tell_.

“You know I would never,” she says, like a damn psychic. It is downright unsettling how good she is at reading people. She lowers her voice. “And I don’t normally betray confidences like this, but you should know I’m 98% certain he’s been having heart-to-hearts with Sam about how terrified he is that you don’t feel about him the way he feels about you.” She gives him an unimpressed look. “I’m telling you so that you’ll realize it’s pretty fucking ridiculous for two grown men to be tiptoeing around each other like this. Act your age.”

“Ha, ha.” He’s never seen anyone look so proud of such an unfunny joke. “So, does having a terrible sense of humor make you a better spy or—,”

“He’s thinks he’s funny,” she remarks to no one. “You’re just mad because you realized I’m gonna make old-man jokes about you and Steve for the rest of your lives and they’ll be  _hilarious_  every time.”

That gives him pause. She’s already talking about them like they’re a done deal.

“Hey,” she says. She catches his gaze. “Whatever it is that you’re afraid of, whatever you think is wrong with you that makes you not worthy,” she pauses, collects herself, and gives him a tiny reassuring smile, “he’s not going to care.”

* * *

 

It shouldn’t be surprising to wake up covered in sweat and tear tracks, shaking and gasping, but that thought never slows his heart down. He sits up in bed and wipes at his face, trying to catch his breath. He thinks of going to the roof, because maybe Natasha will be there and he doesn’t want to be alone, but rain is pelting the windows.

He’s out of bed and padding barefoot across the apartment before all his second thoughts materialize.  _Don’t wake Steve up, you asshole_ , he thinks. Steve is probably asleep. He has to be exhausted. He was gone all day saving babies and stopping evil, or whatever it is he’s doing these days. Bucky doesn’t trust himself enough to ask for details.

He stops in front of Steve’s bedroom door, warring with himself over whether to knock. The door opens before he makes a decision. Steve is there, in pajamas with his hair mussed. He lifts up his arms in silent question, and Bucky walks right into them. Practically collapses into them, really, but Steve doesn’t budge. He wraps his arms around Bucky and just holds him. They stand like that, right inside the doorway, until Bucky’s breathing and pulse slow down to normal. That’s when he becomes conscious of the fact that he’s a total wreck and is halfway crying on Steve’s t-shirt.

“I’m sorry,” he starts, backing out of the hug with no small amount of regret, but Steve shakes his head.

“Don’t,” he says. 

They sit on the edge of the bed and Bucky is reminded of the day, months ago now, when he first talked to Steve in the safe house outside of D.C. He panicked when Steve touched him, that day. At least he’s made some progress.

“You know how many nights I kept you awake coughing and hacking, before the war?” Steve says. “You never let me apologize for that.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” Bucky says, as sure as he can be about something he doesn’t really remember.

“Neither is this.”

Bucky doesn’t know what to say to that. He lets out a breath. What happens in his dreams feels so real sometimes. It’s hard to block it out. Steve lays a hand on his shoulder, and that helps. He wishes Steve would hug him again, but he’s afraid to ask.

“I’d rather have you in here than wherever it is you go when you leave in the middle of the night. I hope it’s not the roof. Brooding on roofs is cliché, Barnes. You’re better than that.”

“Don’t tell Natasha,” he mutters.

There’s a pause. “You were on the roof together.”

“I was trying to brood,” he jokes. “She beat me to it.”

“Do you like her?” Steve asks, after a moment.

He wants to laugh out loud. It’s so different from Natasha silently deciphering him and then declaring “You like him.” He just huffs and shakes his head. “Not like that,” he says.

“Oh. Good. I think she likes Clint. Or there’s something between them, anyway. I decided not to ask.” Steve goes silent for a minute and then says, “Sometimes when it rains like this, I think about that base we took out, outside Fougères.”

It seems unnecessary to speak the words “I don’t remember,” so instead Bucky says, “Tell me.”

“There’s no story, really. I thought France would be nicer,” Steve says. “All that art and architecture. Not that we had time to visit museums. Anyway, it rained for days. There was nothing but mud. I don’t think I’ve ever been so cold or so wet in my life.”

“Oh,” Bucky says, and it comes out like a yawn.

“Not counting the seventy years I spent literally frozen,” Steve says. “That’s not much of a story, either.”

Bucky half-smiles, half-laughs. It’s good that Steve can joke about it. The sound of the rain rises up as they go quiet. Bucky wonders if he would remember more if he went outside in it until he was sopping. Sometimes sensory memory overrides everything. But he’s sleepy and tonight has been unpleasant enough. On impulse, he lies down on Steve’s bed, putting his head on the pillow and pushing at Steve with his feet until he moves to make room.

“You’re boring me,” he informs Steve.

“If you hog the blankets, so help me God, I will push you onto the floor,” Steve says, as if taking more than his fair share of the sheets is the worst thing Bucky could do to him. He lies down next to Bucky, just behind him, and instead of feeling threatening and strange, it feels right.

“We’ve done this before,” he says.

“Yeah,” Steve says. “We shared a bed sometimes in Brooklyn, when it was cold.”

When Steve was smaller than him. But that would feel different. “No, after that.”

“Yeah,” Steve says, very softly. He pauses, then shifts onto his side so that they’re both facing the same direction. He doesn’t touch Bucky, and Bucky begins to wish there was a way to project  _I will not panic and attack you if you touch me_  without actually saying those words. “We had to wait for extraction after taking out that base in Fougères,” Steve continues. “You were badly wounded in the fighting. Sliced open your arm somehow, lost a lot of blood. You wouldn’t have a scar.” Steve touches Bucky’s right arm near his shoulder, then lets his fingers trail down toward his elbow. “It was the other one. We stitched you up, but you were shivering and half out of your mind and it was dark and pouring and the roads were awful and I knew it would be hours before we could get you anywhere. So we camped right there in the mud and I… held you. Just to keep you warm. I think you would’ve made fun of me for it, but you weren’t exactly conversational. I remember spending a long time picking shards of glass out of your hair and telling you what a damn fool you were.”

Steve’s fingers brush through his hair, as if their touch had the power to bring it all back. The events are gone, but the feeling of being close to Steve is familiar. And Steve stroking his hair while they lie in bed next to each other doesn’t exactly fall within the confines of manly heterosexual friendship, but Bucky’s first impulse is to say nothing. Maybe if he says nothing, Steve will keep doing it forever.

He thinks of Natasha saying “Why don’t you ask him?” and “He’s not going to care” like talking about it was the easiest thing in the world, and sighs.

Steve’s hand stops moving.

“No, it’s not—,” he starts. “Steve, did we—were we—?”

Bucky can’t even articulate the question. Which response is more heartbreaking?  _Yes, we did, and you forgot all about it_ , or  _no, of course not, what the hell are you talking about?_. What if Natasha’s wrong? What if he’s misinterpreted this whole thing? His heart shoots up into his throat and keeps him from breathing.

“No,” Steve says. “We didn’t.”

Right. Of course.

“I thought—I didn’t think you saw me like that. You were always out dancing with girls. You dragged me on double dates. I figured it had never occurred to you that I might want you instead of those girls. And I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to ruin what we had.”

Bucky laughs quietly. “That’s rich,” he says. “Me neither.”

Steve moves closer and starts running his hand through Bucky’s hair again. “I don’t think we’re ruining it.”

“If getting separated for decades and then ending up locked in a fight to the death didn’t ruin it,” Bucky says, settling back against Steve, “then it doesn’t seem like a little cuddling is going to be the last straw.”

Steve moves his arm down and drops it around Bucky’s waist. Bucky wraps his hand around Steve’s. Steve curls around him, solid and warm. Steve’s heartbeat is a steady pulse against the irregular fall of rain against the window.

Bucky feels safe for the first time in a long time.

* * *

 

He wakes up with all of Steve’s considerable bulk draped over him and by some miracle, he doesn’t panic. He’s not trapped. He’s happy.

“Hey,” he pokes Steve, “get off me. I gotta take a leak.”

“You always know just what to say to make a guy feel special,” Steve says, and Bucky jabs him in the side relentlessly until he laughs and rolls over. Bucky gets out of bed and takes care of business, and it’s only when he walks back into Steve’s room that it occurs to him that he just woke up in bed with his best friend after they both tentatively agreed to be more than friends. This is a moment when other people—normal people—might have sex.

The thought makes him feel like the floor has fallen out from beneath his feet.

Does Steve want that? Bucky hopes he does, even though it might be a long time before they get there.

Steve is sitting up in bed with his back against the pillows and the sheets over his bent knees. He’s staring intently at something, and when Bucky gets closer, he realizes it’s a small pad. It’s not the big sketchbook with the thick paper and charcoal portrait of Peggy in it. It’s just a little notebook that Steve is making quick lines in with a No. 2 pencil.

Bucky sits down on the edge of the bed, not wanting to interrupt. He thinks about Steve’s joke about him always knowing what to say, and realizes he hasn’t said enough yet. “Steve,” he says. “Thank you. For everything, but mostly for seeing me when I couldn’t see myself. You’re amazing. I wish I could say I don’t know what I’d do without you, but I know exactly where I’d be and what I’d be doing if our paths hadn’t crossed. I’m… it’s hard to express just how grateful I am for you, and how important you are to me.” He pauses to swallow against the catch in his throat. “I’m sorry I haven’t said anything until now. I was afraid it would come out sounding… I guess the contemporary term is ‘gay’.” A huff of laughter escapes him. “Because it is. Gay, I mean.”

Steve looks up from his drawing and smiles. “It’d be a lot gayer if you’d come up here next to me instead of sitting down there like you’re afraid you’ll catch something. Although, actually, I think in our case the contemporary term might be bisexual.”

Bucky crosses the mattress to sit next to Steve, and Steve shows him the pad. It’s a sketch of Bucky, his head at a slight angle and his eyes downcast. There’s a lock of dark hair tucked behind one of his ears. Bucky reaches up and tucks his real hair behind his ear in imitation of the drawing. “You do this from memory?”

Steve smiles. “I’ve had a lot of practice.” He leaves the pad in Bucky’s hands and gets out of bed. He returns a moment later with the big sketchbook. He flips to the third page and passes it to Bucky, then gets back in bed.

The third page is a portrait of him. James Buchanan Barnes smiles in his dress uniform. The fourth page is another portrait, less formal, just a study of his face in profile. Bucky flips the page, only to come face to face with himself again. It’s enough to make a man blush. Suspicious, he flips back to the first page of the sketchbook, the one with all the nude figures studies. There are no identifying marks—no scars, no moles, certainly no bionic arm—but the studies bear a certain resemblance to the body he sees in the shower every day. Bucky glances at Steve, who is looking pointedly away.

“You  _were_  hiding dirty pictures in here.”

“You haven’t seen the half of it,” Steve mutters.

Page six is another male nude, lying on his stomach in a bed, looking peaceful in sleep. The sheets are rucked up around his calves and ankles, leaving his thighs and ass and naked back exposed. Even though the figure’s eyes are closed and his face is half-buried in the pillow, it’s clearly Bucky. It’s a beautiful drawing. It’s sensual, but sweet. Looking at it makes his heart ache.

A self-portrait of Steve appears for the first time on page eight. It’s a picture of them kissing, their heads tilted just so like in a movie poster. Like the previous drawing, there’s a kind of innocence to it.

All the innocence is gone on page eight. There’s no more pretense of classical figure study in this drawing. A flush creeps up Bucky’s face just from looking at it. It’s an image of him lying on his back with his knees up and spread apart, and his right hand around his cock. He looks like he’s enjoying himself. He wonders if he would enjoy it in real life; he hasn’t tried.

“Sorry,” Steve says. “I, uh… have an active imagination.”

“You make better stuff with yours than most people do,” Bucky says.

“I think most people have other outlets for that kind of energy.” Steve rubs the back of his neck.

Well, this answers the question of whether Steve wants to. “So you haven’t been taking any nice girls out. Or nice boys.”

“The world has needed saving a couple of times.”

“So you’ve never—,” Bucky says, and Steve shakes his head. “Oh,” Bucky says. His mouth twists. “Maybe I won’t be such a disappointment, if we ever get around to…”

“Makin’ whoopee?”

“Let’s call it anything but that.”

“I didn’t mean to pressure you into anything,” Steve indicates the sketchbook with the tilt of his head. “With that. I just… as long as we were revealing secrets and all.” He shrugs.

Bucky flips through a few more pages, enough to discover that Peggy makes a reappearance, once dressed as Athena and once not dressed at all. He closes the sketchbook after that and hands it back to Steve, who puts it on the floor. “I guess it’s just your luck to get stuck with me and all my issues, when there are probably people lining up around the block to fuck you.”

“Even if there are people like that, they don’t want me. They want Captain America,” Steve says. “And it doesn’t matter, besides, because I don’t want them.”

“Still, I’m sorry to make you wait.”

Steve reaches between them and laces his fingers through Bucky’s. “I’ve waited this long. What’s a little more time?”

* * *

 

Months pass, and they learn to touch each other casually. Bucky wraps his arms around Steve’s waist while Steve does the dishes. Steve bumps his hip into Bucky’s when they’re both standing in front of the mirror brushing their teeth. Steve lays his head in Bucky’s lap while they watch TV. Once, Bucky slaps Steve’s ass after their morning jog, which surprises both of them.

They sleep in the same bed, but they don’t sleep together. Bucky doesn’t even change clothes in front of Steve, which is ridiculous because Steve obviously knows what he looks like naked. But Steve doesn’t press him about it, and he figures they’ll cross that bridge later.

Bucky still has nightmares, still wakes up terrified and cold several nights a week. Sam’s meeting are helping with that. So is the therapist he’s talking to every couple of weeks. He can’t erase any of what he’s done, or what has been done to him, but he can learn to live with it. It still upsets him that many of his good memories are gone, but the bad ones haunt his dreams with perfect clarity. Steve says they’ll have to make new good memories, and runs his fingers through Bucky’s hair until he falls back asleep.

During the days, he gets restless. Steve is always busy with the other Avengers, identifying HYDRA operatives and trying to neutralize them. He never says a word about it, unless Bucky asks. They try very hard to maintain some normalcy, even though Steve is sometimes gone for days or out all night. They go jogging in the morning. They go to the grocery. They eat take-out on the couch. Steve introduces him to a Middle Eastern dish called shawarma that he really likes. They watch movies with Sam and Natasha.

Still, it kills him to be at home doing nothing when Steve is out there risking his life.

“I want to help,” he asks, one day when Steve comes home. Steve collapses directly on the couch, still in his dirty uniform, and pinches the bridge of his nose. Bucky walks over to the couch and looks down at him. He’s covered in some kind of fine grey powder, like maybe a building exploded nearby and showered him with concrete dust. It probably did.

Steve doesn’t say it’s a terrible idea. He just says, “Okay.”

“You don’t think I’m too crazy?”

“No one in their right mind would do this job.” Steve has his eyes closed like he’s too exhausted to look at anything.

Not exactly a ringing endorsement. “Good point, I guess.”

“And I’d rather have you with me than anybody else.” Steve opens his eyes and smiles.

* * *

 

“You know, there’s a gym in the basement of the building,” Steve says. “Natasha and Sam and I spar there sometimes.”

“Hm,” Bucky says, with as little commitment as possible. He’s not sure he’ll ever be ready to fight Steve again, even if it’s just for fun. He’s not thrilled by the idea of fighting Natasha or Sam, either. But he wants to join Steve’s team, and if this is a requirement, then he’ll suck it up.

“I know you don’t think you’re ready, but I think you are,” Steve says. “Besides, I need to know you can handle yourself. Honestly, fighting me is nothing compared to being a room with all of the Avengers at the same time. Tony literally pokes Bruce just to see what will happen. I love those people, but they are a nightmare.”

“Natasha and Sam will be there, just in case?”

“If that’s what you want, then yes.”

Natasha and Sam show up in gym clothes, laughing about some thing they saw on the internet, and it helps put Bucky at ease. This isn’t the bridge. This isn’t the helicarrier. These people are his friends, and he is not going to kill them. He gets into the boxing ring with Steve, who throws a punch before saying a word or putting on gloves or anything.

“So not Marquess of Queensberry, then,” Bucky says, dodging the first punch and then sidestepping a second. Steve is fast and lighter on his feet than he looks. He’s already trying to force Bucky onto the ropes. Bucky’s best bet is to get in his personal space and take him down with a few powerful, short-range punches, but that’s easier said than done.

Bucky steps forward, jabs right, and then delivers a powerful left hook to Steve’s ribs. The hit lands and Steve pauses for a second. He hears Natasha and Sam crowing and then going silent. He wonders how the fight must look to them, almost too fast to be tracked with normal vision.

Steve recovers, throws a right cross at Bucky’s ribs and lands it. Bucky’s whole torso explodes in momentary pain. He ignores it. Steve moves in again, jabs at him and misses, and Bucky throws a counterpunch that Steve dodges. They’re well-matched and neither of them tires easily. This fight could take all day.

Except Steve sweeps his leg out and sends Bucky sprawling to the mat.

Definitely not Marquess of Queensberry rules. Bucky grabs Steve’s leg with his left arm and yanks him down to the mat. They spend the next few minutes tussling, rolling back and forth, thrashing and grabbing at each other. It’s hard to follow while it’s happening to him, so Bucky can only imagine what Sam and Natasha are seeing outside the ring. They’ve both gone silent.

Bucky finally gets the upper hand, straddling Steve’s waist and pinning his shoulders to the mat with both hands. This is the moment he feared, the moment he thought his latent conditioning might kick in and force him to kill Steve. But he couldn’t kill Steve on the helicarrier when he was entirely brainwashed, and he finds that right now he has an entirely different urge. Steve is flushed and sweaty beneath him, and his hair is sticking up. He grins.

Bucky leans down and kisses him on the mouth.

Steve kisses him right back, and a moment later, Bucky hears Natasha and Sam burst into whoops and catcalls in the background. He raises his left arm and gives them a shiny bionic middle finger.

* * *

 

Kissing is amazing. Kissing is the best thing that’s ever happened to him. How did he ever go so many months without kissing Steve? He wants to kiss Steve until neither of them can breathe any more. They try not to do it in public, but it’s hard.

“Gross,” Natasha says, of the way they look at each other.

“I thought things would get better after you two finally kissed, but they didn’t,” Sam sighs. “I didn’t think it was possible for things to get worse.”

“I’d tell you to get a room, but we’re in your apartment,” Natasha says.

“So why haven’t you left yet?” Steve says.

After a long moment, with a contemplative expression, she says, “I think I’m enjoying your suffering.” Sam chucks a throw pillow at her, and then, thank God, both of them make their exit.

* * *

 

Kissing awakens something in him. Figuratively and literally, since he notices it for the first time when he wakes up. Steve is still asleep on the other side of the bed, and it doesn’t feel right to touch himself with Steve right there next to him. But he wants to try it alone first, just to make sure he can.

It takes several days before an opportunity arrives.  _The World_  is doing a profile on Steve and he has an afternoon interview to attend, leaving Bucky alone in the apartment.

He locks himself in the second bedroom and strips out of all his clothes. He lies down on the neatly made bed and trails his right hand down over his torso. He touches himself with his fingertips and with the flat of his palm, over his abs and the tops of his thighs. He cups his balls and runs his hand over his lengthening cock.

He’d been afraid to try this for so long. He’d thought, for awhile, that he couldn’t get hard any more, that they’d erased that from him like they wiped away so many other things. But all he has to do is think about Steve’s lips, Steve’s tongue in his mouth, and he’s good to go.

He got hard the last time he made out with Steve, too. They spent last night ignoring whatever was on TV, kissing and grinding on the couch. It was absurd, the two of them much too big to be comfortable on the couch, but neither of them cared. Steve had been hard last night, too—not that Steve has any trouble in that department, but last night Bucky had felt the length of him pressing against his thigh. And there’s a memory to get him started. Steve usually takes care of himself in the shower after they make out, and Bucky can’t pretend not to have noticed that Steve possesses size and stamina to go with the rest of him.

He slicks his hand from the head of his cock down to the base and wonders how Steve likes it. Fast or slow? Rough or gentle? Steve is always gentle with him, but he kisses with incredible confidence. He pushes his fingers into Bucky’s hair and tilts his head to the side and presses his tongue into the back of Bucky’s mouth. He rubs up against Bucky, moving his hips like he just can’t help it.

Bucky breathes hard as he strokes himself. He throws his head back and closes his eyes and lets the feeling wash over him. It’s good, so good. His grip is slick and tight and he lets it slip up and down his dick quicker and quicker.

He wonders if he looks anything like that sketch Steve made of him. He wonders if Steve was hard the whole time he drew that. He wonders if Steve touched himself right afterward, if he pulled his cock out and stroked himself until he came all over his fist.

Bucky comes with a short, sharp breath, spilling warm liquid all over his bare stomach. He lays on the bed in silence afterward, just grinning up at the ceiling.

* * *

 

He wants to show Steve immediately, but Steve doesn’t return home for hours. It sets Bucky’s heart racing, and not in a good way. It was an interview. It shouldn’t have lasted this long. His phone buzzing against his thigh makes him jump. It’s a text from Natasha with an address in Midtown and the word NOW. He’s out the door faster than he can type a response.

He runs the whole way there. It’s faster than taking the train. He finds Natasha outside the offices of  _The World_ , standing on a street corner armed to the teeth. She looks him over, in his t-shirt and jeans, like she’s about to reject his application. “Next time you might want to consider gearing up.” He raises his left hand to give her the finger and telling her she could work on making her text messages a little more informative, and she rolls her eyes. “Yeah, yeah, super strength, bionic arm, whatever. Your boyfriend’s incapacitated and being held hostage by some wacko who wants to trade him for you.”

“Shitty trade,” he says. “Wait, are we alone on this? You didn’t even call Sam? Where’s the rest of the team?”

“Calm down,” she says. “It’s just some old guy on a power trip, with maybe fifty heavily armed goons guarding the building. Average Tuesday afternoon kind of thing. We got this.”

“Is this HYDRA?”

“Yes, according to Duris—the wacko in question, CEO of the publishing corporation that owns  _The World_ —but no, according to how damn sloppy the whole thing is. Guessing this is not officially sanctioned by the higher-ups, which is good for us in the long run because it means they’re having difficulty controlling their organization.”

Pascal Duris is in HYDRA? His picture was in the news last week because  _The World_  was turning record profits at a moment when most print magazines were failing. He’d been smiling through his salt-and-pepper goatee. Bucky will rip it off if he hurt Steve.

“You take the southeast stairwell,” Natasha says. “You find Steve and get him out. I’ll deal with the rest.”

It occurs to him, at some point around the fifth floor of an eight-storey building, that this was what he was afraid would happen when he moved in with Steve. HYDRA wants their asset back and Steve is in their way. He’s too angry about it to feel any guilt. He punches out another guard and keeps running.

It stops his heart to see Steve pale and unmoving on the floor of a conference room, even though he knows Steve is just unconscious and not dead. Steve is heavily drugged and tied up, but otherwise unhurt, unlike the ten guards that Bucky left littering the room. They must have had to give Steve a huge overdose to knock him out like this. He doesn’t wake up when Bucky cuts through his zip ties and picks him up.

* * *

 

He carries Steve up the stairs and lays him down on the bed as carefully as possible. He’s reasonably sure that Steve will be fine, and Sam called to say that Natasha had “taken care of” Duris, whatever that means, but the anxiety of waiting for Steve to wake up makes him jittery. He tries to go to sleep next to Steve, thinking that maybe they’ll wake up tomorrow morning and it will all be fine, but instead he lies there in the dark listening to Steve breathe. At least he’s breathing.

That’s why he notices when Steve’s breathing changes. Steve moves in his sleep, murmuring to himself, then thrashes around so much that Bucky has to get out of bed to avoid getting hit. Should he wake Steve? Can he wake Steve?

The question becomes irrelevant. Steve wakes himself up.

“Steve?”

“Bucky?”

“Yeah,” he says. “It’s me.”

“Oh God,” Steve says. He sits up, wipes at his eyes and gulps down a few breaths. Bucky sits back on the bed. He’s not sure what Steve needs from him, so he hangs back, but Steve touches his shoulder and gestures for him to come closer. Once he does, Steve leans in immediately and puts his head on Bucky’s chest. Bucky wraps his arms around Steve, wondering if this is the right thing to do, wondering if his left arm is cold against the bare skin of Steve’s upper arms. He strokes the back of Steve’s hair with his right hand.

“You were dead,” Steve whispers. “I thought I’d never see you again.”

“I’m here,” Bucky says. His first impulse is to say  _it was a nightmare_ , but it was real in 1945. Steve didn’t know then. Steve had to keep living, thinking his best friend was dead. All too often, nightmares are real. He kisses the top of Steve’s head. “I’m here and you’re here and we’re both okay.”

It’s enough.

* * *

 

“You alright?” Bucky says when he hears Steve stir in the morning. “Feel like you got run over?”

Steve groans into his pillow, then rolls over so that he’s facing Bucky. He opens one eye. “More embarrassed than anything else.” Bucky half-smiles at that, and then Steve says, “Though, come to think of it, it does feel like some incompetent punk dragged me up the stairs to get here.”

“Dragged you by your ankles and knocked your head on every step,” Bucky tells him. “Not my fault they turned you into a big lug.”

“Not my fault you’re so weak you can’t even get me up a few measly flights of stairs.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be showering me with gratitude and adoration for rescuing you? I was told there would be adoration.”

“And what kind of ‘adoration’ did you have in—,” Steve’s t-shirt is riding up and leaving an alluring stretch of skin bare. Bucky pokes Steve in the side with his left index finger. “Fuck, that’s cold,” Steve hisses.

“Such language, Captain.”

“Exceptional circumstances, Barnes.”

“I bet I could get you to say it again,” Bucky says. Steve raises an eyebrow, and in return, Bucky sits up and strips off his own t-shirt. He’s never done that in front of Steve, but it’s surprisingly easy. Steve pokes him in the belly as revenge, but Bucky grabs his wrist while he does it to stop him from further tickling. Not to be stopped, Steve lunges in with his left arm, which Bucky also tries to grab. Steve dodges him, hooks him around the waist, and pulls him back down to the bed. Bucky grabs the hem of Steve’s t-shirt and pulls it up over his face until Steve has no choice but to lift his arms and let Bucky pull the shirt entirely off him.

He pauses in admiration of Steve’s naked torso. “You make me feel very patriotic,” he says solemnly.

Steve rolls his eyes and pokes him in the abs again. “You’re not so bad yourself.”

Bucky grins, straddles Steve’s waist and leans down to kiss him. Steve responds instantly. He kisses Bucky like it’s the most important thing in the world. Steve cradles Bucky’s face in his hands and then strokes his hair, and then his hands move slowly down over Bucky’s shoulders and naked back and come to rest on the curve of his hips. Still kissing him, Steve presses down against Bucky’s hips, and Bucky has never been happy to follow an order. He rocks down and forward against Steve, feeling the hard lengths of the cocks catch through their underwear. Steve Rogers, American hero and living legend, makes an utterly filthy little noise.

“Mmhm,” Bucky says into his mouth.

Steve breaks the kiss, a little breathless. “Wait, Buck, is this okay? You don’t have to do this if you’re not ready.” He looks Bucky right in the eye, the picture of sincere concern.

Steve always wants to do the right thing. It’s wrong to make fun of him for it.

“So you would be,” Bucky leans down and speaks softly, with his lips almost right against Steve’s, “just fine,” he rocks forward against Steve again, “if,” and then a long slow roll backward that drags his hard-on against Steve’s, “we stopped?”

“Yes,” Steve says, sounding pained.

“And if we don’t stop?”

“I’d be just fine with that, too,” Steve says, and Bucky can feel him smile. “You little shit.”

“Close, but not quite the word I was hoping to hear,” Bucky says, “and you’re in luck, because I don’t want to stop.” Bucky leans down and kisses Steve again. He rubs up against Steve again, and this time Steve moves with him, bringing his hips up to meet Bucky’s. They do it a few more times, accelerating, and then Steve holds him still and breaks away again.

“This is great and all, but I hear being naked is even better.”

Bucky grins, gets up, and pulls his boxer briefs down his legs. He flops back down on the bed next to Steve, grabs his own dick, closes his eyes in imitation ecstasy and says, “So? Do I look like your drawing?”

“Better,” Steve says. He strips off his underwear, then takes hold of Bucky’s thighs and spreads them apart so that he can settle himself between them. “I waited a long time for this, and you know I have an active imagination. There are a lot of things I want to try.”

Bucky makes a grandiose gesture with his open palm, indicating his own hard-on.

“You’re a dork.”

“What the hell is a dork?”

Steve pauses. “I don’t actually know,” he says. “But Natasha calls me one all the time, so I figure it applies to you, too.” That’s the last thing he says before he wraps his hand around the base of Bucky’s cock and slips his mouth over the head. He sucks the whole length into his mouth, simultaneously pumping up and down with his hand, and Bucky whimpers.

“You sure you’ve never done this before, Rogers?” He tries to keep up the joke but it all falls apart a second later when Steve slides his lips right back down to the base. Bucky gives up on words after that, but still manages to make an impressive amount of noise. Steve apparently has some kind of enhancement that means he doesn’t need air, or else he’s just relentless. Bucky reaches down with his right hand and fists his hand in Steve’s hair, because he has to hold on to something.

Steve finally does pause, but only to swipe his index finger in up Bucky’s cock and then suck that into his mouth, too. Bucky stares at him, too turned on to breathe. Then Steve returns to sucking his cock, only this time—holy fuck, where on Earth did Steve learn—but who cares, it feels amazing. Steve rubs the spot behind his balls with his finger, and then presses gently, rubbing in little circles around the rim of his hole. It makes Bucky’s hips jerk upward. He can see Steve’s eyes crinkle a little bit at that, like he’s trying not to smile.

Bucky gasps Steve’s name and comes in his mouth.

Steve swallows, wipes his lips, and kisses the inside of Bucky’s thigh. Bucky pulls Steve up toward him and into a kiss. The kiss is faintly salty, but he doesn’t care. While Steve is stretched out on top of him naked, he reaches down with both hands, spreads each palm over a cheek, and grabs Steve’s ass. It’s exactly as satisfying as he always imagined it would be, or maybe more, since Steve makes a small “hm” of laughter and surprise into his mouth.

Bucky slaps him lightly on the butt, breaks the kiss, and says, “Well, I guess we’re done here for the day. Thanks for that. How about breakfast?”

Steve gives him the kind of look that turns people to stone in stories.

“Mm, there does seem to be something poking me in the stomach,” Bucky says. Steve’s cock is trapped between them. He can feel it dripping warm pre-come onto his skin. He skims his hand down Steve’s naked back and over the curve of his ass, then fits it into the tight space between their bodies. “Yeah, there it is,” he says. Steve lifts himself up a little, encouraging Bucky to touch him. Bucky gives his cock a few cursory strokes with his right hand, then pushes at Steve’s shoulder with his left. Steve lets him up, and Bucky gets out of bed.

“Don’t move,” he says, and walks to the bathroom to retrieve a jar of Vaseline.

“You’re killin’ me, Barnes,” Steve says while he’s out of the room. “How is this fair?”

Steve is still lying on his stomach when Bucky walks back into the room. He looks glorious naked, and just the tiniest bit tense. “Who said this would be fair?” Bucky asks. He spreads Steve’s legs, sits between them, then slicks up the fingers of his right hand. He leans over Steve, supporting himself with his left hand. He’s careful not to touch Steve with his left hand. It’s fine as a joke, but Steve would probably prefer not to have cold metal against his skin right now.

Steve reaches down and places his own hand over Bucky’s metal one. Touched, Bucky bends down and kisses Steve’s back. Steve loves him. How could he ever have doubted it?

“I want to do filthy things to you,” he says, because it’s true and it’s easier to say than  _I love you and I always have_.

“Then get on with it,” Steve says, his tone just edging toward desperate. He shimmies his hips, rubbing himself against the mattress. Bucky slides one very slippery finger between his cheeks, and Steve exhales.

“No, not like this,” Bucky says. “Turn over. I want to see you.” Steve, to his credit, only gives Bucky about a tenth of a second worth of silent attitude. Then he flips over so that he’s lying on his back and Bucky arranges himself between Steve’s legs again. He spreads Steve’s thighs and presses the tip of his index finger against Steve’s hole. Steve closes his eyes and Bucky slides his finger in. Steve sucks in a breath at that, but he doesn’t really start to squirm until Bucky moves.

“Oh my—Buck—you said you didn’t remember—how—?”

“I don’t, not really, but I spent a lot of time on the internet,” he says, affecting a conversational tone. “That helped. But maybe it’s like riding a bike.”

“Yeah, the internet is,” Steve says, “ahh—,” and then he stops talking because Bucky leans down, takes Steve’s cock into his left hand and wraps his lips around it. Steve’s hand ends up tangled in his hair almost immediately, and Steve’s hips buck upward toward his mouth. Bucky would smile if he didn’t have a cock in his mouth. It’s hard to believe this is Steve’s first time. He feels honored to be the one doing the cocksucking.

Steve is flushed and he can’t stay still. He’s always moving his hips or pulling Bucky’s hair and at one point he presses his left hand to his face and scrubs it through his hair. It’s not until he really starts to babble that Bucky slides a second finger in.

“Bucky—hh—I think I’m gonna—aahh— _fuck_ —,” and it’s a good thing Bucky doesn’t grin in triumph, because that’s when Steve comes in his mouth. Bucky swallows and then takes a moment to look at Steve. His eyes are closed and he’s smiling and catching his breath. He’s mussed and sweaty and has never looked more gorgeous.

“So,” Bucky says. “Did that meet expectations?”

“Nah,” Steve says, still looking blissed out. “Very disappointing.”

“Is that so?”

“Yeah,” Steve says. He draws Bucky up toward him and kisses him. “It’s okay, though. I’m willing to let you try again.”

“How generous of you.”

“Selfless, really,” Steve says, and Bucky laughs and kisses him. Bucky twines their fingers together, and looks down at Steve and watches him struggle to keep a straight face. “You obviously need a lot of practice.”

“Oh, and you’ll let me practice on you?”

“Yeah, this afternoon or tonight or tomorrow, or the day after that, or, you know, next week is looking relatively open, or all of next month…”

“All of next year,” Bucky suggests. There’s no other way he’d rather spend his time. He’s never been so sure of anything. He thinks back, all those months ago, to a man with no name stopping in a diner, stunned by his newfound freedom to make his own choices. These days he makes choices all day long: what to wear, what to eat, where to go, who to talk to. Staying with Steve is the best choice he’s ever made. It’s a choice he hopes to keep making for the rest of his life. “Surely I’ll have learned something by then.”

“I don’t know, you’ve always been kinda slow,” Steve says. Bucky rolls his eyes and gets his revenge by tickling Steve’s left side. Steve shudders with repressed laughter. “We might need more time than that.” He shifts beneath Bucky, revealing a refractory time that can only be described as superhuman. Bucky rubs up against him and Steve sighs in pleasure.

“A guy could get discouraged, hearing you talk like that.”

“Nah, Buck, don’t feel bad. You’ll get it eventually. It’ll take hard work,” Steve grins and rolls his hips on the word  _hard_. “But I’ll be here, with you, till—,”

Bucky tries not to smile and fails. He feels the corner of his mouth lift. “The end of the line?”

“What do you know,” Steve says. “That’s exactly what I was going to say.”


End file.
